Mach speed.

I move at no other pace and often get impatient when others aren’t keeping up with me.

It’s been labeled as “controlling” and “bitchy“ in the past … neither of which did I fondly adore!

I was dubbed squirrel because of the unnerving pace my mind switched gears.

A recent quote I just saw online (respectfully quoting unknown source) “Feeling the need to be busy all the time is a trauma response and fear-based distraction from what you’d be forced to acknowledge and feel if you slowed down.”

Yep…. Take a minute and reread that.

Does that hit you in the feels like it did me?

My ex husband used to ask me to just sit down. Be beside him and watch TV and just be still.

I could do that in the beginning of our relationship but as things started to detiorate my stillness was less and less. I was spiraling in a constant need to work, clean, garden … anything. I just had to keep moving. Because if I sat still, the full impact of the distress in my heart would land on top of me and bury me alive.

I told myself I was strong. I had been through worse and survived. I had rebuilt my life time and again from the mere hope buried in my heart. Somehow that seed that I felt had hardened over, time and again, kept receiving light and water and warmth from some pretty mysterious sources and would crack open once again.

The healing I needed this year after ending a marriage with a man I held dear in my heart for 30 years was nowhere to be found. I wanted to lay down and never take a breath again. All transpiring in the months immediately before the pandemic, this dissolution of a marriage that I thought was finally my forever, left me shell shocked and unrecognizable to myself. Cue the news unveiling the virus, stay at home orders, my beach closing … my friends withdrawn and my studio doors closing.

I have worked years to understand my empathic abilities through much pain and sadness. I have struggled to find the right combination of healing through poses, and salt baths, which stones steadied my shaking hand and which foods nourished my soul. I had my toolbox. Every little thing I needed. I would not fall into the abyss THIS time … although I wanted to.

And as the months passed and my studio doors stayed closed, my tribe all isolated away from me, those tools I pulled out one by one were no longer working. I found that although I have been able to take pain and sadness from others … help them carry their burden … they had also done the same for me all along.

I had not talked about my separation with anyone. The details or the pain. I smiled and continued to provide the support others needed until my dearest friend Carol came and sat with me one day on my porch and broke the dam. She allowed me to share my painful story and sat quietly as I cried and yelled and spewed the madness from the pit of my stomach that was my life.

As I settled, she took her leave with a loving embrace reassuring me I was a warrior. This too, I would rise from.

Carol, who is also an empath, reached out later saying she had taken her leave from my porch because she didn’t feel well and shortly after arriving home was sick to her stomach and regurgitated.  As saddened as it made me that I had released all that negative energy into my friend and it had made her so ill … I experienced the most profound gratitude for this woman who allowed me to do so … and not only let me release, she “took” the pain from me so I could finally rest my soul.

These are your tribesmen my friend. Ones who see you, your pain and take it as their own. They carry your banner when you cannot and then throw that blazing shaft into the sky to herald the call to all others out into the world reminding us to stand strong. Because we will not only survive but we will thrive as we lift each other up and sing their praises from a faithful heart.

Micki Beach, owner and lead instructor at Tree of Life Yoga Studio in Oak Island, NC, is the author of 10 Little Rules for Finding Your Truth. Her book is available at www.10littlerules.com, on Amazon, and at select retail stores and in her studio.